Scientists see political attacks as badge of pride

The past few years have seen politicians attack science, including climate …

The use of science by politicians hoping to score ideological points can have a chilling effect on the way researchers go about their activities, according to a paper published in PLoS Medicine.

We have written about the current Administration's attitudes toward science when that science was inconsistent with its desired outcome. One of the most high profile cases concerned the appointment of a 24 year old to a position in NASA's press office who attempted to muzzle scientists on subjects ranging from climate change to the origins of the universe. But there have been plenty of other incidents, such as restricting the ability of scientists to attend international conferences on HIV/AIDS, the promotion of a widely discredited link between abortion and breast cancer on NIH web pages.

The Administration isn't the only one getting in on the act. House and Senate members used their positions to interject themselves into the case of Terri Schaivo, and have railed against (and sometimes blocked) the funding of research grants they found objectionable. That practice was used again during the recent election, when Gov. Palin criticised federal expenditures on fruit fly research, seemingly without any understanding of the work she opposed.

The specific action of House Republicans that challenged NIH grants is the focus of the current study. To recap the incident, Rep. Patrick Toomey (R-PA) took exception to five NIH grants, mainly intended to address the issue of sexuality, and tried unsuccessfully to pass an amendment that would have struck them from the 2004 NIH budget.

House and Senate Republicans then expanded the list of unacceptable grants from five to ten, and grilled NIH Director Zerhouni on the matter. Following that incident, a staffer sent the NIH a list of more than 250 grants that it was supposed to defend, although Congressional Republicans apologized and withdrew the list; it later became known that "the Traditional Values Coalition, a self-described conservative Christian lobbying group, claimed authorship of this list."

The authors of this study surveyed a number of the principal investigators (PIs, the lead researcher of a given grant) whose submissions were on the Traditional Values Coalition's hit list. 80 percent of the PIs singled out in congressional hearings, and 50 percent of those on the TVC's hitlist, responded to the survey. More than half of these who replied agreed with the statement, "The NIH is less likely to fund research about sexual behaviors because of the current political environment," although less than a third agreed that they were less likely to secure NIH funding as a result.

Many reported removing words from grant applications that could be seized upon by conservatives as objectionable. Around 25 percent reported looking somewhere other than the NIH for funding, and 17 percent dropped studies they thought would be subject to political attack. For a small minority of scientists surveyed, the consequences were even greater. One left the US, two more stopped applying for grants, and a fourth left academic research altogether. It's not clear whether these rates are unusual for this field.

Finally, although a small number of survey respondents reported negative career consequences, more (10 percent) reported the presence of their names among the hitlist as a "badge of pride," and even more (37 percent) reported both pride and some anxiety.

It seems that while there might be a chilling effect that results from political assaults on certain fields of research, scientists took that assault as a perverse form of encouragement. On the other hand, losing talented scientists so that politicians and interest groups can score points isn't healthy for the US research enterprise, nor is self censorship.